Courtney Love shows nude paintings: ‘And She’s Not Even Pretty’

The Hole frontwoman and widow of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain will show a series of highly-sexual paintings titled “And She’s Not Even Pretty” at the Fred Torres art gallery in New York starting next month. The paintings depict a blonde woman, often naked, surrounded by bright colors and words from poems.

She said the paintings began as a tribute to friend and “girl-crush” Gwyneth Paltrow. Here are a few released by the art gallery. (NSFW warning: These images are less sexual than some in the series, but there’s still profanity and nudity.)

Here’s how the gallery’s promotors describe the collection:

The subjects of Love’s drawings are based on the artist’s personal experiences, friends, and her interest in fin de siècle paintings in which women are portrayed as powerful femme fatales, virtuous heroines, or as non-individual beings whose purpose is purely sexual. Through these drawings all of Love’s soul is bared for the viewer – the desire for love and the fear of loss. Working primarily with colored pencil, pastel and watercolor, Love creates highly charged dreamscapes, often containing a vibrant palette filled with gestural forms, and marks that are at times fluid, or compulsive and frenetic, which imbue a deeply moving psychological quality to the works.

The Huffington Post has a look at more images, plus this interview with Love where she talks about why she’s painting.

In one creation, she uses the words from Robert Frost’s poem “Nothing Gold Can Stay.”